Lee Krasner: A Biography [NOOK Book]

Overview

Lee Krasner is best known as the artist-wife of Jackson Pollock, the renowned abstract expressionist painter. Yet in this riveting biography, the first full-length account of her colorful life, Krasner emerges as a significant artist who deserves her place in the twentieth century's cultural lexicon.

In this captivating book, art historian Gail Levin probes Krasner's relationship with Pollock, examining how this strong woman struggled to meet the challenges of their poverty, as ...

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Overview

Lee Krasner is best known as the artist-wife of Jackson Pollock, the renowned abstract expressionist painter. Yet in this riveting biography, the first full-length account of her colorful life, Krasner emerges as a significant artist who deserves her place in the twentieth century's cultural lexicon.

In this captivating book, art historian Gail Levin probes Krasner's relationship with Pollock, examining how this strong woman struggled to meet the challenges of their poverty, as well as her husband's alcoholism and extramarital affair, all the while encouraging his art. Drawing on new sources and numerous personal interviews—including with Krasner herself—Levin has written a dynamic and moving portrait of a brilliant woman, a most welcome work that recovers Krasner's voice and allows us to understand how her life intersected with and informed her art.

What People Are Saying

Erica Jong

“Gail Levin’s biography of Lee Krasner beautifully evokes a period in American art that laid the groundwork for the women artists of today. Lee... contributed wonderful work but also encouraged a whole new generation of artists. She grew into true generativity. Bless her and her biographer!”

Helen A. Harrison

“Rigorous research, deep knowledge of art and cultural history, penetrating analysis and a flair for storytelling bring to life a fully formed Lee Krasner. Those who never knew her will wish they had, and those who did will be amazed.”

Editorial Reviews

Jed Perl

Krasner struck up a friendship with Levin when the author was still a student, and one feels that Levin liked her and still likes her, which is not always true by the time somebody has finished writing a biography.
&#151The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

For far too long, the artist Lee Krasner's reputation has been overshadowed by that of her renowned husband, artist Jackson Pollock. This lively, well-researched biography by Levin (Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography) finally corrects this injustice. Writing with a novelist's flair for characterization and scene-setting, the author traces Krasner's life through the miseries of the Great Depression to the world of art and leftist politics of New York in the ‘30s and ‘40s. While Krasner's artistic genius was temporarily blunted by her marriage, Levin proves she was a phenomenal artist in her own right who was exhausted by having to manage Pollock's personal and artistic life. An artist with a deeply prophetic and eerie style, Krasner's final years with Pollock were awful; mercifully, her "instinct for self-preservation emerged out of the chaos of self-destructive binges," and Krasner set up a separate artistic studio and focused her energies on her own work. This biography crackles with juicy behind-the-scenes stories of America's rarefied mid-century art world, showcasing the genius of the preternaturally gifted Krasner. (Mar.)

Erica Jong

“Gail Levin’s biography of Lee Krasner beautifully evokes a period in American art that laid the groundwork for the women artists of today. Lee... contributed wonderful work but also encouraged a whole new generation of artists. She grew into true generativity. Bless her and her biographer!”

Helen A. Harrison

“Rigorous research, deep knowledge of art and cultural history, penetrating analysis and a flair for storytelling bring to life a fully formed Lee Krasner. Those who never knew her will wish they had, and those who did will be amazed.”

The Oprah Magazine O

“Art historian Gail Levin’s Lee Krasner is a quintuple whammy of a biography—the story of a major artist; a description of a notorious marriage; an education in 20th-century art; a gossipy immersion into Bohemian New York; and a settling of scores against those who practiced gender bias.”

East Hampton Star

“Thorough.... A biography worth celebrating.”

Jewish Daily Forward

“Written with unassuming grace. This rigorously researched, straightforward account attempts to set the record straight about Krasner....the artist could not have found a more gifted biographer to retell her story and argue her case.... [a] fascinating and absorbing biography.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Gail Levin’s stunning new biography finally proves Krasner’s relationship with Jackson Pollock was only a sliver of an enormously colorful life.... Levin’s biography ensures that Lee Krasner will never again be known merely as “Mrs. Jackson Pollock.

Chicago Sun-Times

“It’s about time someone set the record straight about artist Lee Krasner.... Absorbing.... Succinct... Invaluable.... A compelling biography that is as important an addition to the library of American art as any book on Pollock.”

New York Post (Required Reading)

“Art historian Levin befriended Krasner, starting when she was a grad student who interviewed the artist, and she gives Krasner a well-deserved full-fledged bio.”

Wall Street Journal

“Ms. Levin’s perceptive, judicious book reveals Krasner as a fine, important painter....This is an insightful, sharply drawn portrait of 20th-century America from the vantage point of a creative woman swept up in a realm of remarkable artistic productivity.”

Booklist (starred review)

“Levin...is now the first to tell Krasner’s captivating story, writing with equal insight into her teperament, experiences, and art....A consummate scholar, marvelously lucid writer, and gracefully responsible biographer, Levin redresses glaring omissions in the history of abstract art in this imperative portrait of a formidable artist.”

Vanity Fair

“For the love of art....Art historian Gail Levin frames the extremely colorful life of Lee Krasner, major ass-kicking Abstract Expressionist and formidable genius in her own right, better known for boosting the career of her splashier-than-life husband, Jackson Pollock.”

Los Angeles Times

“Compelling. Art historian Gail Levin has drawn on her close association with Lee Krasner and extensive research to produce a biography that rings fair and true.

Dan's Papers (Hamptons)

“Meticulous Lee Krasner celebrates Krasner’s accomplishments as an artist, distinct from her famous husband. The book...gives voice to the indomitable but not invulnerable force of nature that was Lee Krasner . . . .Energetic, stubborn, seductive...Krasner comes memorably alive.”

New York Post

"Art historian Levin befriended Krasner, starting when she was a grad student who interviewed the artist, and she gives Krasner a well-deserved full-fledged bio."

Booklist

"Levin...is now the first to tell Krasner’s captivating story, writing with equal insight into her teperament, experiences, and art....A consummate scholar, marvelously lucid writer, and gracefully responsible biographer, Levin redresses glaring omissions in the history of abstract art in this imperative portrait of a formidable artist."

Library Journal

Artist Lee Krasner has long been dismissed as the feisty, codependent Mrs. Jackson Pollock. Levin, author of the essential Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, challenges past assumptions in this full-length treatment of the talented and tenacious painter. The child of impoverished Jewish immigrant parents, the Brooklyn-born Lena Krassner studied at New York's Cooper Union and National Academy of Design. Immersed in the prewar, left-leaning art scene, she worked as a WPA artist, studied with the influential émigré abstractionist Hans Hofmann, and showed with the groundbreaking American Abstract Artists group. After her 1945 marriage to Pollock, she moved them out to then rural eastern Long Island to separate "Jack the Dripper" from his destructive relationships with booze and broads and to keep him focused and painting. Following Pollock's 1956 death in an alcohol-related crash, Krasner assertively managed his art estate while continuing to work and exhibit until her death in 1984. VERDICT Levin piles up adequate evidence to assure Krasner's place in the American abstract expressionist pantheon. Detailed and meticulously researched, this is essential reading for those who want to know more about protofeminist artist Krasner, New York-based action/abstract expressionist painting, and the postwar NYC art scene.—Barbara A. Genco, Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

First biography of Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Jackson Pollock's wife but also a significant artist in her own right.

Levin (Art History/Baruch Coll.; Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 2007, etc.) links Krasner's motivations and underlying themes to her Russian Jewish background, though Krasner rejected not only religion, but also nationalism and feminism. The author considered herself part of the Paris School, influenced by Matisse and Picasso, and she was a strong influence on the birth of Abstract Expressionism—even though historians often ignore her impact. Politics played a large role in her life, but she kept them separate from her art. Krasner worked for the WPA Federal Art Project through the 1930s until 1943, and though she called herself a leftist, she never became a communist, saving her from the butchery of the HUAC hearings during the '50s. When Krasner met Pollock, she was the first to recognize his genius and made sure that he lived up to her expectation that he would make art history. Her art took a back seat to his career, but she never stopped painting. Though she essentially became known just as Pollock's wife, she still promoted him, protected him, drove him and cosseted him. Krasner and Pollock were among the first to move to Long Island, where both writers and artists came together to form a colony that flourished for years. Living with Pollock was a full-time job, and it took many years before Krasner could finally throw off the comparisons of her work to his. The woman's movement finally brought recognition, but she only wanted to be known as an artist.

Levin deftly connects Krasner's biography to the social and political upheaval of the time. Her long experience in the art world gives insight into the landscape of 20th-century artists, art dealers and museums.

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

Gail Levin is the author of Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, Becoming Judy Chicago, and many other books on twentieth-century and contemporary art. She is Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women's Studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York.

Read an Excerpt

Lee Krasner

William Morrow

Chapter One

Beyond the Pale:
A Brooklyn Childhood, 190821
Lena Krasner was born on October 27, 1908—nine
months and two weeks after her mother, Chane (Anna)
Weiss Krasner, had arrived in New York from Shpikov,
a shtetl located in the southern part of the Russian region then
known as Podolia, now in central Ukraine, about thirty-five miles
south of the city of Vinnytsia. Shpikov was then part of the Pale
of Settlement, the area where the Russian Imperial government
Lena Krasner (right) and her younger sister, Ruth, posing for a snapshot on their front
stoop when they were about seven and five, wearing identical coats and boots as well as
short, cropped straight hair. Unlike their older siblings, they were so eager to be American that they hardly bothered to speak Yiddish or Russian.

Anna had sailed on a Dutch liner, the Ryndam,
out of Rotterdam and had arrived at Ellis Island on January 14,
1908, to join her husband, who had reached America in September
1905, traveling out of Liverpool, England.
In Shpikov, Jews were predominantly Hasidic, followers of
a mystical revival movement that began in eighteenth-century
Eastern Europe. Lena's father had, along with Anna, worked for
a rabbi, helping to manage ritual observances, including dietary
laws, kosher slaughtering of animals, services on religious holidays
and Sabbaths, weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and circumcisions.
Joseph Krasner had left behind his wife and four surviving
children so he could earn money for their passage—a strategy
that was painful, risky, and only too common among those who
wanted to flee the Russian empire in the early years of the
century. But Anna's younger unmarried brother, William Weiss,
had emigrated earlier, and his reports of life in America gave
Joseph the confidence to sail. To the Jews oppressed by the tsar,
America appeared to offer endless opportunity and the prospect
of prosperity.

Before Joseph's departure, the entire family posed for a
photograph before a landscape backdrop. The staid adults and four
solemn children look well dressed, even elegant—typical of what a
couple would want to remember of each other while being forced
apart by the ordeal of emigration. Anna is carefully coifed and
dressed with a ruffled and belted blouse, the children neatly
accoutered and groomed, their father dressed in a modern secular
style, wearing a dapper bow tie and white collar, with no sign
of Hasidic or Orthodox garb. In the photograph, the edge of the
painted landscape is visible. This imaginary background must be
one of the first painted scenes that Lena ever saw.
The hints of prosperity visible in the photograph—and that it
was commissioned—suggest that poverty was not the reason the
Krasners left Russia. The motivations may have been more grave.
There was a massive flight from Eastern Europe, and especially
from Russia, around the turn of the century, when Jews suffered
anti-Semitism, oppressive taxation, and enforced conscription of
their sons.

The Jewish population of Russian Podolia began to emigrate
in the aftermath of the March 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II,
which was blamed on Jews, causing anti-Jewish riots or
pogroms. Pressure to emigrate grew more urgent after the
Krasners heard the ominous news of a pogrom at Kishinev, a town in
southern Russia. In the spring of 1903, anti-Semitic propaganda
from reactionary local journalists led to bands of rioters staging
an organized attack on Jews, looting and destroying their shops
and homes while police and soldiers stationed on the streets stood
by without interfering. The next day, the looting turned to savage
violence—the police and soldiers raped women, destroyed the
local synagogue, and tortured and killed forty-nine people. Nearly
six hundred others were injured.

"There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of
Jews on the day following the Orthodox Easter," the New York
Times wrote. "The mob was led by priests, and the general cry,
'Kill the Jews,' was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken
wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number
120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending
this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn
to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police
made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets
were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make
their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted
of Jews."

The Krasners did not need much more to imagine that this
could happen elsewhere, including Shpikov. Just after Joseph left
for America, a new wave of anti-Jewish pogroms swept the Pale
of Settlement. In response to the pogroms, Tsar Nicholas II issued
the October Manifesto in 1905, which granted fundamental civil
rights and political liberties to Jews, which in turn sparked ethnic
and political tensions and hostilities that exacerbated popular
unrest. Pogroms were directed not only at Jews but also at students,
intellectuals, and other minorities. In Odessa alone, at least 400
Jews and 100 non-Jews were killed and approximately 300 people,
mostly Jews, were injured. Many Jewish homes and stores also
suffered damage. Anna, alone with the children and eager to join
Joseph, must have anxiously waited for him to send her enough
money to escape. When Joseph arrived in America, he was among
the thousands of Jews (77,544 in 1904 alone, almost double the
number that fled in 1902) who left Russia at this time for the
New World, many in response to the Kishinev pogrom. The
imompetus for Jews to flee the Russian empire had only intensified by
the time Anna and the children were able to join Joseph.
The desire for freedom had already inspired some Jews to
promote socialist revolution. Jewish socialists stressed that social
justice had a tradition in their religion: the moral commandments
of the Torah (the five books of Moses read each year from
start to finish) and the Talmud (authoritative body of law and
commentary), and the customs of tsedaka or righteousness and
justice toward others, community responsibility, and mutual aid.
The radicals, who joined an underground labor movement that
organized massive strikes, also took the innovative step of praising
women as comrades and intellectual equals. These actions were in
sharp contrast to traditional Jewish men, who reinforced ancient
customs that seemed misogynistic to many women.
As conditions deteriorated in Russia, some Jews became fixed
on the idea of finding a Jewish homeland, but many like the
Krasners turned to America, though even there asylum was far from
settled. Prejudice toward the new Jewish immigrants meant that
a family like the Krasners had to struggle to earn a living, educate
their children, and obtain an improved standard of living.
At the time, controversy about the massive numbers of Jewish
immigrants from Eastern Europe and about the issue of race itself
pervaded American society. President Theodore Roosevelt had
even been criticized for asking the African American educator
and author Booker T. Washington to the White House for lunch.
The problem of what it meant to be Jewish in America and in
the world at that time concerned United States Senator Simon
Guggenheim of Colorado (the son of a Swiss-Jewish immigrant
peddler). He asked that "the Immigration Commission cease to
classify the Jews as a race," opposing W. W. Husband, secretary of
the Immigration Commission, who wanted census enumerators to
classify Jews as a race. "The Jew is a native of the country in which
he is born, and a citizen of the country to which he swears
allegiance," argued Rabbi T. Schanferber. "We are only differentiated
from others as respects religious beliefs."

"It is a great question as to whether there is such a thing as a Jewish people,"

the noted rabbi Dr. Emil G. Hirsch agreed, saying. "Our blood is mixed
with that of almost every other nationality."

Others such as Rabbi Leon Harrisson of St. Louis, who had
a specific problem with intermarriage, took issue with this point
of view. In a 1909 speech in New York, he said, "History and
experience have shown us that unless we keep our race separate
from others our religion also will soon cease to be . . . diluted to
extinction."

At the same time, popular accounts of work by a Harvard
professor, William Z. Ripley, warned in "Future Americans Will
Be Swarthy" that "racial heterogeneity, due to the direct influx of
foreigners in large numbers, is aggravated by their relatively high
rate of reproduction after arrival, and, in many instances, by their
surprisingly sustained tenacity of life, greatly exceeding that of the
native-born American."

Surrounded by these conflicts over the meanings of race and
religion, a highly vocal and visible fraction of Jewish immigrants
put forward their belief in social justice and political reform.
They found in America such harsh working conditions that they
felt compelled to continue the struggles begun in Europe, often
becoming strike leaders and union organizers. This kind of Jewish
militancy no doubt reflected disillusion with the stories of
a better life in America. At the time of Krasner's birth, United
Hebrew Charities, led by Jacob H. Schiff, tried to raise funds to
support the Jewish poor, especially some of the more than 170,000
immigrants who had arrived in two fiscal years. He spoke of "a
condition of unparalleled distress" during a year of "financial and
industrial depression" and declared that "the Jewish community
was not doing its duty."

Impoverished and often radicalized Jewish immigrants
thronged the Krasners' Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Lena's birth just over nine months after her mother's landing
provided the reunited family with a child who was by law immediately
a citizen of their adopted country. Her father was thirty-seven

and her mother was twenty-eight.

At the time of their arrival in America, Krasner's four siblings
included three sisters—Ides (also known as Ida, later changed to
Edith) aged fourteen, Esther (Ester, later changed to Estelle) aged
nine, and Rose (also known as Rosie) aged six—as well as one
older brother, Isak (also know as Isadore or Izzy, later changed to
Irving), who was then eleven. A fourth sister, Riva, had died in
Shpikov when she was just three or four years old. Isak's situation
had been especially precarious in the Old World because he was
nearly the age when military conscription took Jewish sons away
from their parents, often for periods of up to twenty-five years.
Many times the children were as young as twelve. The outbreak
of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 had put Isak at greater risk.
Though Joseph was an Orthodox Jew, he had not followed
the Hasidism of many of his neighbors in Shpikov. Instead of
their search for spirituality and joy through Jewish mysticism, he
favored the disciplined study of religious texts. Among the
Orthodox, the most prestigious life for any man was to be a religious
scholar. Women were excluded from such scholarly circles and
expected to serve their families as both homemakers and

bread-winners, enabling their husbands to devote themselves to study.
New World realities tempered that tradition in many immigrant
households, including the Krasners', although Joseph was said to
be sensitive and introspective.

Their father was greatly loved by his children, and Lena adored
him, even though, according to her, "he was very remote." She
loved to hear him tell stories to her and her siblings: "Marvelous
tales! About forests. Beautiful, beautiful stories, always like
Grimm. Scary things. The sleighs in winter going out with the
dogs, and there would always be someone standing in the road to
stop them. The forest, and always the snow, and sleighs. A foreign
world to me." These stories of romance and of life in the Russian
empire entered into the children's collective memory. Lena liked to
snuggle up close to her father and listen. She felt afraid of the dark
and remained so all her life.

Her father's stories fueled her imagination. He spoke of his
mother Pesa's magic. Just before Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement),
the shtetl neighbors visited the old woman and asked her
to perform the folk ritual known as shlogn kapores, which involved
her waving a chicken over the head of someone who wanted this
act to transfer their sins to the fowl—three waves of a hen for
women and one wave of a rooster for men. Afterward the
applicant, now sin-free, hoped to be inscribed in the metaphorical
"Book of Life" for the coming year. Shlogn kapores, opposed by
various rabbinical authorities since the Middle Ages, continues to
exist among some Orthodox Jews as a folk practice.
Lena particularly cherished the story about her father's old
aunt, said to have come from the city to the shtetl in the forest to
help celebrate her parents' wedding. The aunt was so significant
that "the bridal couple had to give up their bed to her. She was
tough, dominant and nearly immortal. When she died at 103, she
had outlived four husbands." Krasner's memory of the aunt as
"tough" and indomitable mirrors how she liked to think of herself
later in life.

As an adult, Krasner remembered that when she was about five
years old, she was alone in their home's dark hall when something
that was "half man, half beast" seemed to vault the banister and
land on the floor by her side. She cried out—a childhood enigma
that resurfaced during psychoanalysis and made its way into a
painting. Though we know that the adult Krasner remained
traumatized by this early experience, she did not elaborate on
what sort of monster she experienced. Though she picked up her
mother's fears and superstitions, Krasner longed to be strong like
her legendary great-aunt and adopted that persona whenever she
could.

Joseph's religious books with their elaborate decorations and
Hebrew script also fascinated little Lena. There were also

newspapers in Yiddish, a Germanic vernacular language that utilized
Hebrew letters. Lena started Hebrew school when she was about
five years old, but instruction focused on shaping letters instead of
thoughts: "I learned to write but I couldn't read it. . . . Visually I
loved it. I didn't know what it meant. What they're teaching, they
will say—they'll give you the alphabet, identify it—I could
follow that to a certain point. What I couldn't follow was actually
reading. I was slow there, if you will. So that visually I could stay
with it."

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Customer Reviews

hcsHS

Posted April 6, 2011

Highly recommended as it is a great read

I read this book and loved it because its the true story of a very important woman artist who remained dedicated to her work throughout her life, committed to seeing her vision realized despite male chauvenist critics and dealers. Times have changed but not nearly enough as Krasner's story still happens to women artists in our times: Ironically, the only mixed review have read anywhere of Levin's biography is by a man. Levin provides the facts as well as Krasner's personal insights in her own words: removing any doubts that Krasner deserves to be recognized as a first generation abstract expressionist. The reader is left wondering why Krasner's work is left out of histories about this artistic movement: leaving no doubt the only reason is that she was a woman. Gail Levin tells this story in a way that makes this book a compelling read. She is a careful and thorough scholar, writes a richly textured story that Krasner would have appreciated.

5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

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PPSS

Posted April 8, 2011

Fascinating

Levin combines a look at social issues with the story of a real person. She also gives us an insightful glimpse into the art world of the early and mid twentieth century. Perfect for my book club!

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted January 12, 2015

All for Jackson Pollack

A great book about Jackson Pollack wife and the trials and tribulations she endured for the sake of his career.A accomplished abstract artist in her own right never given much acclaim for her contributions to the New York School Era

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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JohnDaly55

Posted May 3, 2011

A Marvelous Book

I picked up this book after reading a wonderful biography by the author on Judy Chicago. I have to say that Gail Levin has outdone herself with Lee Krasner. Her storytelling is rich and her research is superb. I especially liked how close the author was with her subject-- their relationship adds a richness and added dimension to the story that makes the book very intimate and enjoyable. Highly recommended!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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KevinWhitfield

Posted May 2, 2011

Highly Recommended

I loved this biography of a gutsy artist who was politically active, especially the tales of her adventures during the 1930s. I had not known that much about her beyond the film Pollock and seeing her paintings in some museums, but she had a fascinating life that informed her art work. This is a lively well-written book with many characters who almost seem to come out of a novel, though it is carefully documented and convincing.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Art_Teacher

Posted April 17, 2011

Highly recommend

Lee Krasner- an artist in her own right, not just a wife! Levin skillfully provides insight and understanding of what this role was like during a time period when women were not only expected to take a "back seat" but did not receive the recognition they deserved. Krasner brought to life by Levin is an "excellent read!"

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted December 23, 2013

I loved reading this biography of a great woman artist who deser

I loved reading this biography of a great woman artist who deserves to be better known. You can find out a lot about the art world and the problems women artists had to overcome. Krasner was a fascinating figure. From her youth in Brooklyn to her struggles in art school, she was just unstoppable!

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